200 Migrants Are Believed Drowned in Capsizing Off Libya

CAIRO — About 200 migrants are believed to have drowned off the coast of Libya when their boat capsized, the United Nations refugee agency said Thursday.

The disaster, which the agency said took place on Wednesday night about 15 miles off the Libyan coast, is one of the deadliest this summer as thousands of migrants from Africa and as far away as Syria and the Palestinian territories have made their way to the lawless shores of Libya for a chance to get to a better life in Europe. More than 2,100 others have already died this summer.

Smugglers of migrants profit from transporting refugees to Libya and then sending them into the sea, often jammed into flimsy vessels with many more passengers than the boats can hold. The migrants who board them say their goal is to be rescued by the Italian Coast Guard, which will deposit them in a refugee camp in Europe. Few hold out any hope that their overcrowded vessels will make it all the way to Italy.

But the smugglers who launched the boat that sank on Wednesday appear to have packed it with an extraordinarily precarious number of passengers, even by the desperate standards of the trade. Officials of the refugee agency, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, said in a statement that officials believed the smugglers had squeezed about 600 people into a boat that should have carried 40 or 50 at most.

Survivors said that the passengers saw a rescue ship in the distance and in a panic rushed to one side of the vessel, causing it to capsize, the agency said in its statement. Passengers who did not know how to swim stood little chance of survival.

About 400 of the estimated 600 passengers were rescued, the agency said, and about 25 bodies were recovered. Dozens more were missing or feared dead, the agency said.

Libya has collapsed into chaos and conflict since the ouster of Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi in 2011. The absence of any central authority and the long, unpoliced Mediterranean coastline have made Libya a magnet for desperate migrants from around Africa and the Middle East. And more recently, the escalating violence in Libya has also redoubled the determination of many African migrants to risk their lives for a chance to get a giant step farther to Europe — even those who might previously have stayed to find work in Libya.

Many of the local militias that have carved up control of the country, meanwhile, appear to be profiting from the smuggling trade, essentially charging protection money, according to interviews with Libyan smugglers and a panel of experts assembled by the United Nations to monitor the country.

European countries are debating potential measures to try to stop the flow of new migrants reaching their borders, both to avoid a burden on their own budgets and to reduce the deaths at sea.

But in interviews, many migrants in Libya — even those who have already survived one shipwreck — insist that the risk of drowning is still a better gamble than returning to the desperation of their home countries or enduring the predations of the Libyan militias.

More than 200,000 migrants have already reached Europe from across the Mediterranean this summer.

A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A6 of the New York edition with the headline: 200 Migrants Are Believed Drowned in Capsizing Off Libya. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe